Rockwell Crooked Road

Vol. 55, No. 1 Ethnomusicology Winter 2011

© 2011 by the Society for Ethnomusicology

Time on the Crooked Road: Isochrony, Meter, and Disruption in Old-Time Country and Bluegrass Music

Joti Rockwell / Pomona College

The Virginia Heritage Music Trail, otherwise known as “The Crooked Road,” is a site of cultural preservation and promotion that links important centers

of traditional music for the region. Winding through the southwestern part of the state, the trail connects Galax, for example, where the historic Old Fiddlers’ Convention continues to draw some of area’s best old-time and bluegrass musi-cians, and Bristol, where Ralph Peer recorded country music’s formative “Bristol sessions” in 1927. Traveling between museums, record stores, live performance stages, and informal jam sessions, visitors to the trail engage with the music of Ralph Stanley, the Carter Family, Dock Boggs, and others who have played a defining role in bluegrass and old-time music. It is significant that the Crooked Road has come to symbolize the musical heritage of the region and, in part, the genres of old-time and bluegrass them-selves, since the suggestion is that like the trail, the music winds through unique and satisfyingly unpredictable turns. Lacking the standardized homogeneity and commercial influence of a modern interstate, the geographical idiosyncrasies of the local roads comprising the trail can represent distinct points of cultural pride for local residents and authentic sites of discovery for tourists. The organizers of the Virginia Heritage Music Trail chose the name because of this geographical/musical metaphor: on the one hand, Highway 58, through which much of the trail passes, has long had the title of the “Crooked Road” as its nickname. On the other hand, as Brandi Hart (one of the project coordinators) remarked, a fiddler can “take the crooked road” by “playing a backstep on the instrument” (personal communication, July 2007). This article’s goal is to investigate and provide an explanatory basis for the type of musical phenomenon referenced by this remark. The term “crooked

56 Ethnomusicology, Winter 2011

tune” is in common use among current practitioners of bluegrass and old-time music, primarily with regard to fiddle repertoire that in some way denies tem-poral regularity (Titon 2001:29; Goertzen 2008:76). These types of pieces are not particular to the music of the Virginia Heritage Music Trail, nor does this region encapsulate the genres of bluegrass and old-time in general. But given the aptness of the metaphor—“visitors” to the music associated with the Crooked Road have a history of valuing and interpreting it according to its rhythmic idiosyncrasies—I invoke such music in this study to gain an analytic framework through which a variety of genres and regional musics might potentially be ex-plored. That is, I regard “crookedness” as a general principle involving subjective paths of musical experience, and I view it as a concept that, for certain repertoire, can lead to an understanding of the particularities of musical performing and listening. The notion of “playing a backstep” is perhaps best exemplified by the in-strumental breakdown “Clinch Mountain Backstep,” which is a signature banjo piece for Dr. Ralph Stanley, a successful bluegrass and old-time musician who has a museum along the Virginia Heritage Music Trail. For the most part, the piece contains the typical structure of a bluegrass breakdown or fiddle tune, in which two repeated 8-bar strains create an AABB form. The second strain, though, contains an extra beat that the transcription in Figure 1 groups into a 34 measure.1 Since this temporal discrepancy defies a listener’s expectation of a regular half-note pulse, “Clinch Mountain Backstep” can be regarded as a “crooked tune.” Banjoist Tony Trischka describes the moment as follows: “The most idiosyncratic part of the tune is the extra beat in the [third] measure of the B part. This time quirk harkens back to the old players who would add or delete beats because that was just the way they heard it in their heads. It’s a delicious part of the tune” (2002:49). “Clinch Mountain Backstep” raises a host of questions regarding rhythm, meter, and symmetry. First, what in principle makes a tune “crooked,” and how can the phenomenon best be theorized? What aspects of musical performance and perception lie behind the appearance of asymmetry? What is the prevalence of this phenomenon in old-time and bluegrass music, and how has it changed over time? “Clinch Mountain Backstep” is one of many instrumental tunes that

Figure 1. Ralph Stanley, “Clinch Mountain Backstep” (simplified).

old-time and bluegrass musicians regard as rhythmically irregular, but how does texted song relate to the phenomenon, and how does asymmetry come to bear on the relationship between vocal and instrumental melody? Is crookedness more an aspect of predetermined compositional strategy or moment-to-moment improvisational choice? Finally, what implications does the idea of crookedness have for questions of musical value? These questions are too numerous and wide-ranging to answer in a study such as this one, but I would like to suggest that some provisional answers can be found through careful listening to historic recordings. As a performer, I have witnessed heavily-rehearsed, highly scripted onstage excursions as well as im-promptu, parking lot picking session derailments, and it has struck me how the rhythmic success of a performance can hinge on a variety of factors ranging from the repertoire itself to the subtle musical habits of the players. I thus feel that fieldwork on synchronization, meter, and musical mistakes in current old-time and bluegrass would give a vital perspective on the above questions, and I am also intrigued by what precedents can be found in the recorded history of the music. This study in general follows the latter approach, which, echoing an argument by Ronda Sewald (2004), I find as productively complementary to the former. Although it does not contain prototypical “crooked tunes” for fiddle, an excellent source for the present topic is the recorded output of the Carter Family, a trio from southwest Virginia whose music has been a principal influence on contemporary country, bluegrass, and folk music in the United States. In addition to their historical status, their prolific quantity of commercial recordings, and their well-documented musical career, the Carter Family’s use of three voices and two instruments is valuable for this study since it lies between the necessar-ily coordinated rhythmic approach of a large group and the complete flexibility of a solo performer. In principle, then, what may sound like a “crooked tune” could either be a result of compositional planning or improvisational caprice. Moreover, since Maybelle Carter plays a guitar break on nearly all of their songs, and nearly all of their repertoir includes singing, the majority of their recordings provide the opportunity to compare vocal and instrumental approaches to the same melody. This article proceeds with a model of metrical disruption that draws from theories of rhythm, meter, and music perception, after which I discuss the results of analyzing approximately three hundred of the Carter Family’s recordings based on the typology of the model. The recordings attest to a remarkable variety of rhythmic practices in their music. I then turn to a few examples of bluegrass music to briefly address historical and genre-related aspects of the idea of crookedness. I conclude with a reconsideration of metrically “straight” repertoire and sugges-tions for contemporary ethnographic work on rhythmic practices in old-time and bluegrass music.

Rockwell: Time on the Crooked Road 57


Crookedness as Disruption

This study conceives of a “crooked tune” as music that includes a disruption of an expected pulse layer. As the following discussion will show, such a concep-tion is generally in keeping with definitions of the phrase commonly given by performers: tunes having “extra” or “missing” beats, that have “irregular rhythms,” or that “aren’t square.” In casting crookedness in terms of pulse disruption, I seek to draw together various strands of rhythm and meter theory that I regard as more mutually compatible than current literature would suggest. First, the historically canonical “architectonic view” regards meter as an unfolding com-bination of commensurate pulse layers, with each layer being a succession of time points or beats that can be regarded as isochronous. Though this view had earlier precedents, it crystallized in the work of Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983), who used dot notation to represent metric hierarchies and provided rules under which well-formed meters can be constructed. The applicability of their theory has been wide-ranging: though many authors discount or modify its rules for well-formedness, the idea of meter as stacked pulse layers has informed stud-ies of rock (Temperley 1999), Schumann’s music (Krebs 1999), African music (Temperley 2000), North Indian tāl (Clayton 2001), and electronic dance music (Butler 2006). The theory has applied to a variety of music due to its foundations in cognitive science, its ability to separate general layers of musical motion, and its basis in listening rather than musical notation.2

Echoing Charles Keil’s critiques of architectonicism (1966), Christopher Hasty (1997) presents an alternative view based on ideas of process and pro-jection.3 For Hasty, meter is not a static grid of time points but the continuous unfolding of temporal projections, such that music is a process involving the ways in which potential durations are projected and realized. Rejecting the concept of durationless time points and arguing against a dichotomy between rhythm and meter, Hasty lays the philosophical groundwork for approaches to meter that focus on listener expectation. Having such expectations not be fulfilled, which in Hasty’s theory amounts to a “projective potential” not being realized, provides a phenomenological basis for experiencing crooked tunes. Further views on metrical expectation and disruption come from empirical work in cognition, where human ability to entrain or synchronize to pulses and adapt to rhythmic variation has been extensively tested (London 2004:9–17; Repp 2005; Huron 2006:175–78). Contained in this work is the “attentional en-ergy” model of Mari Riess Jones, in which the time points in a metric hierarchy are viewed as targets of human attention according to a perceptual principle of synchronization. Following Jones, Justin London defines meter as “the antici-patory schema that is the result of our inherent abilities to entrain to periodic stimuli in our environment” (2004:12). Entrainment, viewed as the targeting

and fulfillment of expectation, thus addresses the experiential dynamics behind Lerdahl and Jackendoff ’s model by engaging some of the processual issues that Keil and Hasty have raised.4 Disruption can be a profound occurrence accord-ing to this view, because in its ability to desynchronize the listener from his environment, it can dissipate meter altogether.5

Figure 2 illustrates how the above theories can inform a hearing of “Clinch Mountain Backstep.” Here, the basic meter for the piece consists of a quarter-note “tactus” or counting pulse and its slower duply-grouped counterpart, a half-note pulse. That these pulses correspond to quarter notes or half notes is arbitrary, though Western notation often represents the duration of a tactus beat with a quarter note. Other pulses exist for this excerpt—eighth-note and sixteenth-note pulses are explicit in the banjo line, for example—but the two layers in Figure 2 are sufficient for illustrating why “Clinch Mountain Backstep” can be regarded as a crooked tune. The perception of the existence of these particular pulses (as opposed to dotted-eighth or dotted-quarter pulses, for instance) results from the interaction of the musical events explicit in the performance and the contingent habits and tendencies of a given listener.6 Though not shown in the transcription, the bass is perhaps the most important means of establishing these two pulses, since it provides constant quarter notes that typically alternate between the chordal root and fifth for each measure (e.g., the notes A and E underneath an A major chord, such as what one commonly hears in country music basslines). In sum, the pulses corresponding to the transcription’s quarter notes and half notes become established and remain steady through the first two measures of Figure 2. In the third measure of Figure 2 (measure 11), the tactus remains constant, but the music lengthens as the melody approaches the E that marks the mid-point of the second strain. Most listeners at this point, particularly those who are unfamiliar with the tune, have good reason to expect some kind of arrival at the seventh quarter-note beat of the excerpt, since the corresponding point in the first strain had featured a melodic arrival on E and a change by other band members to an E major chord. This beat in Figure 2 is thus an attentional point that does not receive the musical emphasis listeners have been conditioned to

Figure 2. Metrical disruption in “Clinch Mountain Backstep.”



expect from it, and in Hasty’s terms, the musical region features a projective potential that is left unrealized. Figure 2 illustrates the unfolding pulse layers with dots in the style of Lerdahl and Jackendoff, and it represents the disrup-tion of the expected pulse with a crossed-out arrow.7 The ultimate effect of the disruption is to render a particular pulse layer non-isochronous.8 A number of important aspects of crookedness should now come into view. First, the phenomenon can be related to but is not based on Western notation. Changing time signatures may suggest a particular form of asymmetry, but time signatures at best give a rough idea and at worst an entirely misleading cue to the actual metrical organization of a piece.9 This is a particularly important consid-eration with regard to orally-transmitted musics, for which no prescribed time signature exists. Even in cases for which signatures are implied without written music, multiple signatures can still characterize music with a single metrical profile, and disruptions can occur at pulse layers other than the two suggested by the signature itself. For example, what one musician might call a “fast waltz” might be heard by another as a piece in 68, and the piece might sound crooked due to disruptions at layers other than the quarter note and dotted quarter note layers that a 34 signature suggests. Second, a crooked tune in general does not have to involve disruptions in relatively fast pulses; if, for example, a listener is expecting a double-breve pulse and hears a disruption of this pulse, she can regard the music as crooked. I allow this interpretive flexibility because, in principle, the distinction between “meter-level” periodicities and “phrase-level” periodicities is one of degree and not kind.10 This is not to say that phrase structure and metrical structure are equivalent; Rothstein (1989:11) and Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983:21) are careful to maintain this distinction, and the fact that musical phrases can begin on an upbeat highlights the point. Nonetheless, insofar as this study construes meter as a way of attending to time, unusual length or shortness is not sufficient to render a time span as fundamentally “non-metrical.” Third, disruption is subject to interpretation and listening preferences. If, in the case of Figure 1, a listener is inclined to sometimes place downbeats between performed notes and to regard parallel passages of music as metrically dissimilar, he may regard “Clinch Mountain Backstep” as straight and not crooked. Such preferences, particularly the second one, would be unusual for most listeners, but more commonly, listeners who prefer to attune only to the quarter-note and not the half-note pulse will not notice a disruption. Alternatively, listeners can simply adjust appropriately: as David Huron has observed, “The nonperiodic character of certain rhythms does not prevent experienced listeners from forming accurate temporal expectations” (2006:188). Thus, musicians may not regard a piece as crooked to the extent that it concurs with their temporal expectations. A final aspect of crookedness is that its interpretations are contingent upon a

subject’s musical predispositions. Since the present study has as its basis a theory of temporal expectation, it follows that the expectations of a listener will vary depending on how she typically attends to rhythm.11 A listener is most likely to attend to pulse layers corresponding to previously entrained periodicities, meaning that both genre conventions and musical background can lead to varying modes of meter construction and attunement.12 For example, musicians who have practiced 44 conducting patterns may be inclined to attune to a wide range of pulse layers, since such a pattern can include four such layers: “One”; “One, Three”; “One, Two, Three, Four”; and “One and Two and Three and Four.” Music that does not main-tain an isochronous whole-note pulse would thus be saliently disruptive for such listeners. In contrast, musicians used to keeping time by tapping their feet may incline toward more narrow ranges of metrical depth (“One” and “One, Two”), thus hearing music with whole-note pulse disruptions as generally straight. Likewise, square dancers often need to coordinate via fourfold modes of attunement, while solo dancers have the liberty of focusing on relatively fast layers of pulse.13

Crookedness, then, is not an objective property of musical architecture. As a concept relating to meter as much as to literal rhythmic structure, it is a feature of musical experience that is contingent upon a subject’s modes of attending and the layers at which perceived disruptions of isochronous patterns occur. Given these considerations, Figure 3 presents a precise means of hearing dif-ferent kinds of disruptions for the music examined in this study. A tactus is not

Figure 3. Three types of disruption.



something that will be universally agreed upon, but for the present purposes it suffices to regard it as the pulse layer at which a musician might stomp her foot while playing or listening to a piece. For triple meters, I take the tactus to be the pulse that groups its shorter neighbor in threes.14 Various types of asymmetry can appear in relation to these tactus layers: a disruption of the slower neigh-bor of the tactus is a “first order” disruption; a disruption of that is a “second order” disruption; and so on. Note that the closer a disruption is to the tactus layer, the more “crooked” a piece tends to sound. No tactus-level or sub-tactus asymmetries appear in the music of this study, although the model can account for such phenomena. Generally speaking, Figure 3 illustrates a view of metrical disruption that provides interpretive flexibility to a listener and avoids being defined according to a notated score.

The Music of the Carter Family

Using the model of metrical disruption described above, I examined the mu-sic of the Carter Family in order to answer some of this study’s initial questions.15 My source is the 290 complete songs in the Bear Family Records twelve-CD set, which is by far the most exhaustively compiled and researched collection of their recordings from 1927–1941.16 Given that these are commercially-released recordings, the performance context is generally one of rehearsed precision for the group, who would diligently work out and memorize pieces before going to the studio. All three of the Carter Family members—A. P., Sara, and Maybelle—could play guitar and sing, although typically their recordings include Maybelle playing guitar and singing, A. P. singing sparsely, and Sara playing autoharp (sometimes one containing only five chords) and singing. Some of their songs are vocally har-monized throughout, while solo vocal parts are principally sung by Sara. Maybelle’s distinctive guitar style (nicknamed the “Carter scratch”), which would greatly influence later generations of country, bluegrass, and old-time players, combines low-string melodies and higher-string chording with an intricate motion of the right hand (see Seeger 2005). Given that A. P. Carter avidly collected songs as a means of furthering their recording career, the Carter Family’s repertoire reflects a wide diversity of genres: sentimental parlor songs, British balladry, African-American music, church hymnals, and others.17

Table 1 gives some intriguing statistics about the Carter Family’s music. As the first row indicates, two-thirds of their recordings contain at least one instance of one of the three types of disruption considered here. Of this portion of songs, the “first-order duple” type is the most prevalent, with songs that contain exclusively second-order disruptions occurring at about a third the frequency. Some songs contain both types, but Table 1 groups such songs under the first type since a first-order disruption is by definition a second-order disruption as well.

With regard to the question of how sung text relates to instrumental perfor-mance, this study found that Sara Carter, the group’s lead singer, and Maybelle Carter, the lead guitarist, tend to both perform non-isochronous passages of music with a wide variety of similar techniques. In other words, there is not a hierarchy of rhythmic disruption in which the sung text governs the piece; rather, Maybelle’s melodies can influence the temporal unfolding of a song as substantially as the vocal parts do. In nearly all instances, lead vocals and lead guitar lines alternate, such that the hierarchy is always clear (allowing for some small-scale vocal rhythmic discrepancies if harmony singing exists), and it is not uncommon for Sara to follow Maybelle’s leads with a slightly late chord, or for Maybelle to adjust to the vocal line with a modified guitar bassline or with a slightly late harmony vocal entrance.18 Often, the guitar and vocal lines create disruptions in equivalent ways: Figure 4 illustrates how all the types of crooked-ness outlined in Figure 3 can appear identically in the two parts. Table 1 provides further evidence for the idea that the guitar and vocals both play important roles in creating metrical disruptions, since just over half of the non-isochronous songs have a disruption within a vocal section and just under half include a disruption within a guitar break. Figures 5 through 7 illustrate the remarkable variety of rhythmic practices within these parts, since when taken in combination with Figure 4, they represent all possible approaches to disruption between the guitar and vocals: the guitar can be straight but not the vocals, the vocals can be straight but not the guitar, the guitar and vocals can have the same approach to disruption, and both can perform different types of disruptions in the same song.19

In addition to occurring within vocal and guitar sections, disruptions in Carter Family music can occur during a transition, such as from the first verse to the second verse, from a chorus to a guitar break, and so on. Transitional disruptions occur in just over half of the Carter Family’s non-isochronous songs,

Table 1. Characteristics of the 290 complete songs on Carter Family (2000).

Songs with disruptions 194 of 290 67% a) 1st order duple (may also contain 2nd order) 119 of 194 61% b) 2nd order duple (not 1st order) 33 of 194 17% c) 1st order triple 42 of 194 22%Where disruptions occur a) Vocal part 119 of 194 61% b) Guitar break 84 of 194 43% c) Transitions between sections 120 of 194 62%Songs on which Maybelle Carter plays a guitar break 280 of 290 97%Songs with duple meter 219 of 290 76%Songs featuring a chord other than I, IV, or V 3 of 290 1%Songs with disruptions occurring consistently 116 of 194 60%Duplicate versions with identical disruptions 6 of 25 24%



Figure 4. Carter Family excerpts in which guitar and vocals contain identical dis-ruptions.

Figure 5. “On the Rock Where Moses Stood” (1930): Guitar break has a 1st order duple disruption but vocals are straight.

and Figures 8 and 9 illustrate the prototypical ways that they can occur: elision and extension. In the passage shown in Figure 8, Maybelle Carter leaps into a guitar break without waiting a full four tactus beats after the final syllable of the preceding vocal strophe, thus skipping a relatively weak quarter-note beat and shortening the musical space unfilled by a melody. In the passage shown in Figure 9, Sara Carter gives herself an extra tactus beat before moving from the chorus to the final verse of “The Storms are on the Ocean.” This technique is far more common in Sara’s performances than in Maybelle’s, and the difference exemplifies their individual approaches to music making. Listening for disrup-tion in the Carter Family’s music thus draws attention to the specific musical characteristics and tendencies of a given performer, which suggests that rhythmic disruption be regarded as a mode of expressive subjectivity. A number of explanations exist for why Sara Carter inclines more toward transitional extension and Maybelle Carter toward transitional elision. Unlike Sara’s vocal lines, Maybelle’s guitar style dutifully avoids sustained notes. Given also that the tempos for Maybelle’s guitar solos are usually at least 4 bpm faster than the vocal sections surrounding them, her early guitar entrances could be

Figure 6. “Can the Circle Be Unbroken” (1935): Guitar break is straight and vocals have a 1st order duple disruption.

Figure 7. “A Distant Land to Roam” (1929): Guitar and vocals have different kinds of disruption (2nd order and 1st order duple).



part of a broader performative approach of efficiency and economy. While it may be tempting to consider elision in context as an instance of Maybelle’s musical diligence preventing their performances from exceeding the roughly three-minute recording limit, the fact that the Carter Family’s 1939 radio per-formances (for which no such time limits existed) were typically shorter (Kahn 1996) argues against such a conclusion.20

Composition, Improvisation, and Consistency

Regarding the question of whether crookedness is a composed or an impro-vised phenomenon,21 the record involving performance practice for the Carter Family gives evidence of both processes at work. As Mark Zwonitzer comments, “it was a point of pride among the Carters that they rarely had to do more than one take of any song” (2002:183), suggesting that their music was essentially composed. It was impractical to do numerous takes with the early wax recording technology, and there were instances in which takes other than the ones desired by Maybelle Carter were those chosen for release (Maybelle and Sara Carter interview, 1963). The group thus had a strong incentive to have their music scripted before putting it to record, a notion that is supported by the fact they carefully timed out each piece before recording it (Maybelle and Sara Carter interview, 1963). But some temporal flexibility was clearly part of the script as well, since as Maybelle Carter humorously remarked, both Sara’s and A. P.’s musical maneuvers could be difficult to predict:

Figure 8. “Worried Man Blues” (1930): transitional elision (1st order duple).

Figure 9. “The Storms are on the Ocean” (1927): transitional extension (1st order triple).

[Sara’s] hard to sing with . . . when you stay away from her a while, but I got so used to her when I was working with her. If she’d get tired, as June says, if she had to swallow she would swallow; it didn’t matter where it was at . . . (laughter) . . . ah, in the middle of the song! And this is what A.P. would do, you know when we was recording, if he, I mean if he felt like singing, he’d sing and if he didn’t, he’d walk over there and look out the window or he’d come back. See, he didn’t play an instrument, and he’d just walk around over the studio and he’d come over and sing three or four words and then he’d go off somewhere else. So we never depended on him for anything (laughter). We just let him sing when he got ready. (Maybelle Carter interview, 1973)

Thus, non-isochronous music can become naturally coordinated by a group with a long history of performing together. John Cohen, whose band the New Lost City Ramblers was central in reviving and documenting music such as that of the Carter Family, explained the process in terms similar to those of Maybelle Carter: “In the latter years of the Ramblers, we didn’t have to count; we just followed who was singing . . . we didn’t have it planned out” (personal communication, July 2010). It is reasonable to conclude that Figures 8 and 9 represent these types of decisions made in the moment of musical performance, especially since the ef-fect of eliding and extending transitional space often does not remain constant from one verse or chorus to the next, and since such disruptions need not be effected by more than one member of the group.22 Figures 5 through 7 also sug-gest something of an improvised approach to disruption, since the vocal and guitar parts differ within a single song. Nonetheless, many Carter Family songs include two- or three-part vocals, which necessitates a composed or practiced approach. Figure 10 provides support for this argument, since the kind of simu-lated fermata that the Carters sing together on “Grave on the Green Hillside” could scarcely have been generated through collectively spontaneous choice. As the above discussion suggests, a reasonable indication of composition and improvisation is consistency. If musicians approach time the same way they had done previously in a song, the music is in a sense predetermined, while if they stray from previous practices, a particular kind of improvisation is at work. With this definition in mind, I tracked each Carter Family song according to

Figure 10. “Grave on the Green Hillside” (1929): Metered fermata (1st order tri-ple).



whether the performers approached equivalent sections of music in equivalent temporal ways. Again, Table 1 speaks to the variety of musical practices in their recordings, since roughly over half of their non-isochronous songs contain disruptions that appear consistently across sections. “Little Joe” (1938), for example, is inconsistent in that it contains only one instance of disruption, a second-order transitional extension before the song’s final strophe (see Figure 11). “Girl on the Greenbriar Shore” (1941), however, is remarkably consistent throughout, always containing 29 tactus beats for each vocal refrain and 28 for each guitar break (see Figure 12). One might suppose that Carter Family songs become more consistent over time, but the recordings of the 1938, 1940, and 1941 sessions show no appreciable trend in this regard, and the question of consistency appears mainly to do with the specifics of individual songs.23 Regarding consistency across versions of the same song, the Carter Family gen-erally did not treat the same non-isochronous songs in equivalent ways, doing so with only roughly a quarter of the examples. Figure 13 illustrates how the Carter Family renders four versions of “Single Girl, Married Girl” metrically unique within the remarkably short stretch of a single verse. Even though some Carter Family songs appear to be composed—at least in the sense of maintaining certain approaches to disruption throughout a song or

Figure 11. “Little Joe” (1938), only instance of disruption (transitional extension, 2nd order duple).

Figure 12. “Girl on the Greenbriar Shore” (1941) consistency throughout song.

across multiple recordings of a song—evidence of notated Carter Family music gives only subtle indications of the group’s highly variable approaches to meter. Norm and Anne Cohen (1973), working with nineteenth-century printed music, some repertoire of which the Carter Family would later perform, noted a trend toward simplification in the scores prior to the 1890s. During this era, printed music generally avoided chromaticism and maintained simple four-square phrase structure, presumably for ease of reading. The songbooks that may have provided some of the Carter Family’s gospel repertoire, though occasionally containing close similarities to the group’s vocal approach (Wolfe 2000:22), likewise tend toward easily readable four-square rhythmic notation (Neal 2005). And though A. P. Carter was from a musical family and could read and write using Western notation, the primary method for learning songs seemed to have been writing down only the words and memorizing the melody, after which point the Carter Family would “fix [the song] up to suit their style” (Kahn 1970:43–44, 55). Simi-larly, Judith McCulloh, in examining commercially available transcriptions of Carter Family songs, concludes that “the melodies appearing in commercial sheet music and folios, aimed as they were at a popular market, are simple and straightforward”; potential buyers would “automatically furnish the appropriate . . . rhythmic variation” (1967: 237). Nonetheless, while sheet music and performances that substantially devi-ated from it metrically seemed to coexist unproblematically during the Carter Family’s era, the domains of written and performed music were still connected. According to Leslie Riddle, a Carter Family source for African-American mu-sic and occasional companion on A. P. Carter’s song collecting trips, another method of gaining repertoire was to obtain sheet music that was thirty-five or forty years old from those who were willing to offer it (Kip Lornell, cited

Figure 13. Different approaches in different versions of “Single Girl, Married Girl.”



in Bulger 1976:29). Furthermore, a comparison of an 1888 reissue of an 1860 source of “Wildwood Flower,” the Carter Family’s 1928 recording, and a 1934 song folio of the kind that the Carter Family would sometimes sell at perfor-mances (Kahn 1970:53) suggests that fermatas serve as the notational indicator of metrical extension in performance. As Figure 14 shows, for this portion of the song, the fermatas/extra beats do not always occur in equivalent places, but they always provide extra time when two words—not one—form the pickup to the next lyric.

Hearing Transmission, Reconsidering “Straight” Music

Returning briefly to old-time and bluegrass music more generally, one can note that in the genre of bluegrass, which in many respects is a more modern rendering of old-time music including that of the Carter Family, some aspects of their earlier metrical practices persist while others are straightened. Specifically, transitional extension proves to be an effective way to ensure that enough time exists between instrumental breaks and vocal strophes. Given that tempos are typically faster in bluegrass, and that larger ensembles involve more coordina-tion, though, first order disruptions are rare. The most common disruption in bluegrass music is thus one in which the tactus has twofold but not fourfold organization in between the sections of a song. The Stanley Brothers’ 1947 re-cording of “Molly and Tenbrooks”—a foundational recording for the genre since it is one of the first direct copies of the style of Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys (Rosenberg 1985: 84–85)—contains this type of second order disruption between the second strophe and the following fiddle solo (see Figure 15). An equivalent process occurs between the banjo break and the third verse in Flatt

Figure 14. Temporal extension in the 1888 (1860) sheet music, 1928 recording, and 1934 folio of “Wildwood Flower.”

and Scruggs’s 1961 rendition of the Carter Family standard “Worried Man Blues.” The lack of a time signature change in the transcription of Figure 16 illustrates that Flatt and Scruggs worked with a different sort of approach to time than did the Carter Family, who had included a first order disruption in the same song (Figure 8). Historical “straightenings” of “crooked tunes” such as those shown in Figures 15 and 16 are too numerous to mention, but they raise important questions about disruption, style transmission, and value. This study has suggested that crooked-ness is not a reason to dismiss a repertoire as “irregular” by modern standards but rather a means of engaging closely with questions of musical production and perception. If the phenomenon is conceptually and aesthetically privileged, though, what are the implications for music that does not display the trait? If scholarly inquiry into the rhythm of early American music highlights asymmetry over symmetry, it indeed runs the risk of implicitly devaluing an enormous repertoire of metrically regular music. Nonetheless, the current study does not ultimately lend itself to a view in which earlier music is more interest-ing and becomes less so as it straightens out over time, because the modes of perception and interpretation outlined here apply as equally to straight tunes as they do to non-isochronous ones. For example, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s 1972 rendition of “Keep on the Sunny Side,” one of countless “straightenings” of a previously non-isochronous Carter Family tune (featuring Maybelle singing it, no less), need not be heard as having complete four-fold symmetry. The line “always on the sunny side,” with a I chord occurring on “side” rather than “sunny,” supports an interpretation that regards this tonic arrival as a downbeat, thus disrupting the half-note pulse with a double-downbeat (Figure 17). The original

Figure 15. Stanley Brothers, “Molly and Tenbrooks” (1948) (2nd order duple).

Figure 16. Flatt and Scruggs, “Worried Man Blues” (1961) (2nd order duple).



Carter Family performance of the tune, in which such a first-order disruption is entirely plausible, can thus inform such a hearing of the later rendition.24

In sum, given the wide variety of approaches to time in bluegrass and old-time music, the phenomenon of metrical disruption resists generalization from one musician to the next. The specificity and individual nature of the performing practices involved, as well as the varied contingencies of any single listening experience, ultimately point away from a clear separation between “straight” and “crooked” music and toward a more intimate knowledge of how the music is performed. It follows that the relatively modern notion of a “crooked tune” reflects a history of subjective musical expectation that remains in flux. Since this study has worked primarily with twentieth-century audio recordings, it is an initial step, and it is clear that work with contemporary musicians, includ-ing both tradition bearers and more modern players, will shed further light on the processes that afford different forms of metrical attunement. Additionally, a detailed examination of song could further distinguish the effect that text has on rhythmic and metrical practices, while a study of instrumental music stands to engage more closely with the relation between music and dance. Last, work on crooked tunes in contemporary fiddling, both professional and amateur, promises to illuminate issues of aesthetic value, musical competence, authen-ticity politics, and musical transmission. This paper has used the metaphor of the Crooked Road as a means of focusing its lens on the specifics of musical performance and experience; the same metaphor may well widen it.

Acknowledgements This paper began as part of a panel organized by Byron Dueck for the International Council for Traditional Music conference in Vienna in 2007. I would like to thank fellow panelists Byron and Nikos Pappas, and I am grateful to Tim Cooley for discussion and encouragement thereafter. As a Pomona College Undergraduate Research Assistant, Ondrej Hochla provided valuable theoreti-cal insight and an important additional set of musical ears for the Carter Family corpus. I would like to thank John Cohen, Peter Feldmann, Richard Greene, and John McEuen for their generous

Figure 17. Carter Family and Nitty Gritty Dirt Band with Maybelle Carter, “Keep on the Sunny Side” (1928 and 1972).

and insightful conversation on the topic, as well as the two anonymous reviewers and editor Larry Witzleben for helpful comments.

Notes 1. For simplification, the transcription in Figure 1 parses out the articulative intricacies of the banjo line in order to highlight the overall melodic and rhythmic profile. These details, in particular the “forward roll” picking pattern, nevertheless play a central role in generating the extra beat. 2. More generally, the present discussion relates to Michael Tenzer’s ideas of “periodicity” (2006), which are explicitly conceived in order to engage with a broad spectrum of music. 3. Butterfield (2006) has explicitly drawn connections between Keil’s critique and Hasty’s theory by using ideas of projection and anacrusis to highlight the relationship between participatory discrepancies and their syntactic context. 4. See Clayton, Sager, and Will (2004) for an overview of entrainment and a discussion of its potential as an ethnomusicological mode of inquiry. 5. The significance of disruption is suggested by studies such as Besson and Faïta (1995) and Vuust et al. (2009), which provide evidence that temporal disruption of the kind examined in this study elicits neurophysiological responses. 6. Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983:74–96) formulate these tendencies as “metrical preference rules.” 7. Readers familiar with Hasty’s theory will notice that I have not completely adopted his perspective, which would avoid terms such as “point” and would employ two arrows for the disrup-tion. One of these would represent the “definite potential” created by the prior duration, while the other, a crossed-out arrow such as what I have drawn, would represent the unfulfilled potential of the present duration to “affect the becoming of a new event” at (in traditional terms) the seventh beat (1997:84–91). 8. I use the terms “isochronous” and “non-isochronous” in the same sense as London (2004); they serve as more technically precise synonyms for “straight” and “crooked.” 9. The limitations of Western notation for representing bluegrass and old-time music argue against the idea of “hypermeter,” which is notationally based. The term refers to timespans larger than that of a measure, so in this study, following London (2004:19), I see no essential difference between hypermeter and meter. 10. See London (2004:27–30) for a brief discussion of the perceptual limits of meter; I incline toward being very flexible with these results with regard to the longest pulse layers. 11. Responses to the disruption of these expectations will vary as well. For example, Besson et al. (1994) have shown that brain waves differ between musicians and non-musicians encountering temporal disruption. 12. McKinney and Moelants found that genre significantly affects the rate at which subjects tap along to music, with the average tapping rate for classical music being under half that for metal/punk (2006:159). Drake, Jones, and Baruch (2000) suggest that older and more musically trained subjects attune to slower pulse layers, although this finding is not universally held. Martens (2005:59), for example, considers a spectrum of “deep” and “surface” tappers without recourse to musical training. 13. The motion of the human body is central to processes of entrainment, and is a promising area for further inquiry involves relationships between different types of dance and the rhythmic processes studied here. Neal (1998), for example, has drawn specific connections between meter and country-and-western dance. Solo dance is a vital tradition in southwest Virginia, and various types of dances have different implications regarding metrical depth (Seeger 1992). “Backstep” is a name for one such type, though it does not appear to correspond directly to the rhythms of Ralph Stanley’s piece. 14. Whether this relatively long pulse constitutes the most plausible tactus has much to do



with tempo, although I maintain the tempo-independent definition of a triple-meter tactus for the sake of analytic consistency. 15. Important precursors to this investigation are Townsend (2001), which analyzes seventeen early Carter Family recordings through the lens of rhythmic asymmetry, and Neal (2002), which gives detailed rhythmic and metrical analyses of both original and cover versions of Jimmie Rodgers songs. 16. By “complete songs,” I exclude the interviews in the collection as well as the routines involving Jimmie Rodgers. I include the four recordings from 1963 despite the large gap between these and the earlier recordings. 17. Bulger 1976 classifies the bulk of their repertoire as sentimental and religious songs, with the minority including small groups of ballads, blues, and Western songs. 18. Occasionally, apparent downbeat asynchrony occurs when one part contains a disruption and another does not, but the players tend to adjust very quickly (Townsend:181–84). Genuine mistakes, though, such as the A over G major clash in [2:44] of “The Cannon-Ball” (1935), are exceedingly rare. 19. Figure 5 provides a counterexample to one of Townsend’s conclusions that “in no cases is it [the guitar’s melodic statement] expanded [from its sung form]” (2001:179). The present study nonetheless confirms that “melodic truncation” is a normative feature of Maybelle Carter’s guitar style. See Neal (2002:58–65) for a detailed analysis of “Can the Circle Be Unbroken.” Regarding Figure 7, one could in fact hear the vocal line as not containing any disruptions at all by hearing a whole-note beat on the extension of the word “home” and no relative strong beat on “Dis-tant.” For this study, I have tended to prefer hearings that remain close to the performed music and that do not generally assume four-fold (i.e., whole-note) projections. 20. These radio transcriptions from the Carter Family’s time on border radio are rhythmi-cally comparable to the recordings examined here, and I do not examine them in detail. They are, nonetheless, a promising source for further explorations of rhythm and performance context. 21. Like Berliner (1994:1–17), I view this question as essentially heuristic. 22. As John Cohen remarked, “vamp ‘til ready” is an operating principle in such musical situations (personal communication, July 2010). 23. One explanation for why consistency generally did not increase over time is that much of the later repertoire had only recently been collected by A. P. Carter and was new to the group. Maybelle Carter has noted that during this time, the group would occasionally resort to having lyrics to read for the sessions (Maybelle and Sara Carter interview, on Carter and Carter 1963). 24. John McEuen also noted the uncertain harmonic rhythm of the passage (personal com-munication, August 2010). Further support for the interpretation given here comes from the studio comments of Doc Watson, who asked Maybelle Carter to clarify the arrival of the chord for him prior to recording the tune. One can speculate that this was due to an expectation of tonic arrival on the previous quarter-note beat, hence an expectation of a half-note pulse that gets disrupted by the I chord to follow.

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